(This post originally appeared at The Comics Reporter. Thanks, Tom.)

1) I was glad for the presence of Douglas Wolk. His experience with non-aficionado periodicals was useful in highlighting practical considerations regarding the dearth of considered long-form criticism in the mass media that Gary Groth, Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler, and Bill Kartalopoulos (the editors of Will Eisner‘s later work is overrated.

3) I only ever hear complaints that the web has diffused informed opinion and is therefore inferior to the supposed centralization of print publications from people who work for print publications. In this panel the loudest voice on this point was Gary’s, who first said that it’s even hard to find good film criticism online. At first he said that this is because there wasn’t any, but then when called on it by Tim, he admitted that he just didn’t have the time to find it. Not to be all roll-over-Beethoven about it, but I can’t imagine it’s really any more difficult or time-consuming for me to have found Matt Zoller Seitz’s blog, or Joe McCulloch’s for that matter, than it was in Gary’s much-vaunted mid-century golden age of arts criticism for people to have first discovered Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, much less Gene Shalits of their day. I think it’s a safe bet that if the average reader of this blog asked her mom and dad who Pauline Kael was, they’d have no idea. As an audience member pointed out, criticism isn’t consumed by large numbers of people because most art isn’t consumed by large numbers of people in ways that would make them receptive to criticism. As she said, this is doubly true of comics, where large numbers of people aren’t consuming that art form at all, so yearning for a more vibrant critical milieu for comics is in some ways a fool’s errand. But while I could be wrong, I think it’s unlikely that this mass audience for criticism ever existed even for more popular art forms. If we instead mean a large audience of well-educated, well-informed cognoscenti, we should say so.

5) Doug advocated for the value of “bomb-throwing” — divisive pieces intended to provoke debate. I’m not crazy about this at all. For every act of bomb-throwing into which went a considerable amount of thought, like the Eisenstein or Bazin. As I tried to point out, I think the emergence of Comics Comics as an antipode to The Comics Journal — a voice seemingly less interested in combative “this is bullshit and this is emphatically not bullshit” throw-downs, seemingly more open to evaluating corporate genre work, seemingly more attuned to non-narrative sensibilities versus literary ones — is important, but as that diverse collection of attributes would suggest, this isn’t exactly a coherent philosophy. I tend to think coherent philosophies are wildly overrated at best and stultifying and poisonous at best, though, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

7) Tim pointed out that the Journal‘s combative posture is understandable given the climate in which it started, one in which Maus had to be defended versus lengthy examinations of Steve Gerber‘s oeuvre without worrying that this will be taken to mean the work is on the same level as Gary Panter‘s.

8) I wish it were pointed out more often that there’s really no such thing as “the Journal.” There’s Gary, and there’s whoever’s the editor, and then there’s a bunch of writers who submit reviews and essays with no editorial guidelines and no back-end content editing either. (At least in my experience.) I know what “the Journal” is supposed to mean, but in reality it means the opinions of R.C. Harvey, Noah Berlatsky, Joe McCulloch, Tim O’Neil, me, Chris Mautner, Michael Dean, Kristy Valenti, and a couple dozen more all at once.

9) I wish the phrase “the dumbing down of American culture” were removed from this discussion. A look at the top-grossing films and best-selling books during the so-called Golden Age of Criticism indicates that America has always been pretty dumb, a state of affairs not at all unique to America, hey by the way.

10) Tim Hodler looks like Walter Becker from Steely Dan.

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